1. Field of the Invention
Coincident with the meteoritic rise in the popularity of the computer to access the Internet in both the home and office environment, there has been a surge in the number of individuals that get some sort of vicarious thrill out of disrupting, or, more accurately, corrupting computer hard drives by way of a worm, or virus, which propagates itself and spreads wherever it can gain access. Many of these viruses, by way of example, reside on, or otherwise attach themselves to, any and all active computer drives and from there corrupt, or destroy, data and, coincidently, propagate themselves by sending themselves to recipients on the user's e-mail address list. Millions of dollars worth of losses have been felt worldwide as a consequence of such conduct.
By virtue of the existence of a number of operating systems and programs, which may have incompatible components, together with an ever increasing demand for storage space on such computers, many find it cost effective to mount more than one storage device, such as a hard drive, on a single CPU.
The addition of one or more storage devices, however, does not protect user data from corruption if, as is inevitably the case, the CPU comes under attack by a virus or worm. The only known way to positively protect a user's software programs, data and documents is by storing a backup copy on a secondary storage device, e.g., a second hard drive, and then somehow taking the secondary storage device out of the data stream.
When such a companion, or secondary storage, device is to be used on a single CPU, it is desirable to be able to selectively isolate the companion storage device(s) from outside influence, without inhibiting the user's ability to access the secondary drive(s) quickly and efficiently, as needed. It is within this environment that the present invention has particular utility, not only for isolating a storage device from Internet corruption, but also for isolating a storage device from a conventional network, for purposes of confidentiality, for example.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In light of the relatively recent origin of the problem, there have been few innovators in the computer field that have applied themselves to proposing a protection and backup solution which is effective, yet affordable, for the average user.
The state of the art and usual practice in virus protection is to have actively running in the background a virus protection program such as those available from McAfee, Norton, and, perhaps, others. These software makers focus their efforts on detecting viruses being spread on an ongoing basis, programming virus protection code into constantly revised “dat” files, and then making these “dat” files available to users for download, in order to upgrade their virus protection software programs to detect and mitigate the latest, offending viruses.
The obvious flaw in this scheme is that a virus has to have spread around, been detected, a fix created by these companies, and a download opportunity provided to subscribers. The user has to have downloaded the most current virus data file before his/her computer becomes infected by the then current virus in order to be protected from that particular virus.
As is well known, the most effective and malicious viruses spread so rapidly that many computers become infected before a fix is even made available and/or implemented by the user. Few users stay on top of downloading the most recent upgrades to ensure the best possible virus protection for their software. As evidenced by the constant upgrades to address the then current virus, virtually any software protection can still be defeated by a better virus. Indeed, it has become a game between those who would defend and those who would corrupt.
Harold J. Weber, in his U.S. Pat. No. 6,067,618, concerns himself with a CPU in which multiple hard disk drives are present, each of which may have a different operating system stored thereon. However, Weber seems preoccupied with prevention of cross talk, or binary, corruption between drives. In so doing, he avoids inter drive incongruities, by isolating each drive from every other in order that, inter alia, different users may neither simultaneously access one particular drive, nor access more than one of a multiplicity of drives. Weber's focus appears to be on isolating drives from each other such that 1) benefits of discrete and different operating systems may be enjoyed on the same computer, or 2) multiple users using the same computer cannot corrupt each other's data (as in a student environment) on the same computer using BIOS settings, electronic circuitry, etc. Weber's primary scheme is to switch “master” status of various drives which are physically installed on the same computer, and modify the BIOS to effectively ignore those drive(s) which do not have the “master” status.